Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Will a 'happy' China, make for a happier world?

China, as we all know, is the new kid on the block in world affairs, and with its increasingly bulging economic and military muscles, it’s not surprising that a lot of intellectual energy is being expended on guessing what kind of man the new kid is going to grow up to be.

Right now China’s foreign policy often feels erratic. One day bully-buzzing Japanese or Vietnamese ships in the east and south China Sea, the next winning plaudits for escorting World Food Programme ships along the pirate-infested coast of Somalia.

On the Libya issue China abstained over the enabling UN resolution (and so didn’t veto it), but equally it recoiled from the directness of the Coalition intervention to save Benghazi, which isn’t surprising given China’s long-held policy of non-intervention in other country’s internal affairs.

That core belief is also why China told UN, in so many words, to “butt-out” when one of its committees called for the release of Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer, as it did this week.

Gao has been horribly treated by a Chinese state which still has no qualms in being brutal to those who would aid its enemies – he defended members of the Falun Gong movement, Christians and victims of land-grabs and is paying the price.

Making sense of the often conflicting signals that China sends out is never easy, but there is an excellent article by Tsinghua University’s Yan Xuetong, one of China’s leading strategic thinkers, which explains some of the contradictions.

Yan, who it is fair to say sits on the nationalist side of the spectrum, roughs out the two contending schools of thought in China about the principles of its foreign policy in the coming years. The first is the Chinese School, which is remains largely in the ascendant and follows Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of keeping a low profile. It is essentially pragmatic in outlook, with decisions driven by economic, not moral imperatives.

This is the China that would leave the people of Benghazi to their fate, arguing that this is Libya’s problem and, in any case, as a poor country (in per capita terms) China isn’t ready or willing for leadership at this level. The counter-weight to this approach is what Yan calls a Confucian or traditional approach, which draws on an ancient Chinese idea that “rulers who rely mostly on military or economic might divorced from morality, he argued, cannot achieve long-term success on the international stage.”

He points to the growing importance of Confucianism within China – a statue of Confucius appeared on Tiananmen Square last year – and, more profoundly, the shift in Chinese government rhetoric away from economic to a broader concept of happiness.

Happiness, is not a frivolous concept in Confucian terms, says Yan, implying a search for a social morality that has got lost in China’s rush for development after the social catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao years.

The great unknown, is how this change in outlook at home – if it doesn’t turn out to be purely cosmetic – would feed into China’s foreign policy, or indeed if a 'happier' (more self-confident) China would make for a happier world.